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Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey

Pick of the week

As Starkey explains in his excellent introduction, Henry VIII's first two queens were much more important than their successors and, accordingly, Six Wives focuses most of its attention on them. Henry's break from Rome is convincingly anatomised, and Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn both emerge as strong, self-willed players. Starkey makes no bones about his decision to tell their story rather than Henry's, but the king's absence does leave a hole. His frequent assertions that Henry was in "love", without ever giving us a strong sense of what that means, typify his confident assumptions, and it is doubtful that Henry will emerge from Starkey's next book, a long-promised biography of the king, as the pawn he sometimes appears here. It is also grating, in a work of serious scholarship, to have such characteristics as submissiveness and sensitivity baldly described as "feminine". Starkey's thudding rhetoric and his use of modern